Talking Scared

Send us a text I’m in literary hero territory again … at least this time it’s sunny!   My guest is Scarlett Thomas, the groundbreaking writer of PopCo, Oligarchy, The Seed Collectors and the (post)modern speculative classic, The End of Mr Y. She’s one of my favourite writers, who has never seen five or six separate genres she can’t mash together.   This time around we are talking “Hot Gothic” in T...

Send us a text Carrie White turns 50 years old today!   April 5th, 1974 – the day King’s debut came out, and the world of horror we know live in changed forever.    To celebrate such an auspicious anniversary, there are only two people I could invite to this party. Step up Nat Cassidy and Ally Malinenko – writers who understand King and that bitter, brutal world between childhood and adulthood.  ...

Send us a text Alas, we come to the end!   Stephen Graham Jones’s The Angel of Indian Lake brings the most important horror trilogy of the century to its conclusion. For one last time we return to Proofrock, Idaho – to watch Jade Daniels do battle with monsters in the wood and the demons in her head.    SGJ also comes back to Talking Scared to finish our adjacent trilogy of conversations about the...

Send us a text Chi-Town!!   We’re heading to the midwestern metropolis this week, for a conversation with Cina Pelayo – all about murder, mystery, history and strange things in the water.   Her new novel, Forgotten Sisters is a heady, dreamlike concoction of Chicago lore and much older horrors. It features a pair of very wyrd sisters and a house by a river that holds nothing good.    As well as al...

Send us a text Never mind the floor is lava. This week the ground has teeth.   Joshua Hull is our guest, to talk about his obsession with dangerous, weird holes. He wrote one into his hilarious, grisly horror movie, Glorious (on Shudder) and now he’s given a hole a whole personality in his debut novella, Mouth.    It’s a grindhouse, b-movie celebrations, with larger than life characters, grisly de...

Send us a text Time to get liminal and haunted.    Gwendolyn Kiste comes back to Talking Scared for another high-concept twist on the Gothic. In The Haunting of Velkwood, and entire street turns ghostly overnight. Yeah, I can’t explain that any more clearly, we’ll leave it to Gwendolyn.   Despite this being a book centered on trauma and angst, we do a whole lot of laughing. Amongst the chuckles we...

Send us a text Sometimes you meet someone who just gets you.   Like Tim Lebbon. A man who writes riotously good adventure-horror novels, and also likes running outrageous distances up big hills. What a pleasure it was to speak to him.   The main topic of conversation is his new novel eco-horror novel, Among the Living. A story of ancient buried history and ‘intelligent’ infection, it blends the pa...

Send us a text Back from a too-short break, but ready to delve into the greatest haunted house of them all! Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. The place where the scary things walk alone.   Thankfully, I am not alone. I’m joined by my own group of creepy ghost-hunters: Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts, Cabin at the End of the World), Johnny Compton (The Spite House) and Catriona Ward (Last House on...

Send us a text Yes I put sex in the title to make you download it. Did it work?   It shouldn’t be necessary, ‘cos this week’s guest is an absolute literary icon. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, Haunted, Lullaby, Choke, and last year’s Not Forever, But For Now – a writer who helped shape the nihilism and extremity of 90s and noughties fiction. The man who makes people faint with his short st...

Send us a text Are you hungry?    If so we have a chewy, salty, deeply flavoured feast for you this week. Ally Wilkes returns to Talking Scared to discuss the icebound horrors of her new novel, Where the Dead Wait. It’s a tale of Arctic exploration gone very wrong, complete with haunting, human suffering and the morbid fascination of cannibalism!   Don’t pretend that hasn’t whet your appetite.   A...

Send us a text The first new book coverage of 2024 – and it starts us off on suitably horrific footing.   Jenny Kiefer’s debut novel, This Wretched Valley, has been getting a huge amount of early buzz in horror circles. It’s the story of four unlucky adventurers, who head into the Kentucky woods and meet all manner of nasty sh*t.    It’s a tightly wound tale of misadventure, that takes at least so...

Send us a text To kick off a new year of Talking Scared, I’ve gone and hooked us a big guest, with a whopper of a story.   John Langan is the author of The Fisherman. It’s one of the great works of supernatural fiction written this century, but its story doesn’t end at its back-cover. The strange mythology of The Fisherman extends beyond, swimming further downstream, to pop its monstrous head abov...

Send us a text Another year done. We squeaked through without another plague or a nuclear apocalypse (don’t tempt fate Neil!!) and along the way, oh the stories we read!    The only thing left to do after mopping away the chalk pentagrams, is to run you through my very favourite books of the year. The so-called Best Horror Novels of 2023, as chosen by me. Ten of them to be precise, cos humans are...

Send us a text Dickens said that Christmas Eve was a time for ghost stories, and who am I to argue?   It is my show though, so I get to pick the ghost story – and I picked Peter Straub’s classic novel of the name. A tale of old men with horror in their youths, seductive evil and a town besieged by winter and… worse things.   It’s a slippery beast though, this novel. So to really help pin it down,...

Send us a text And so we come to the end of another year in horror. Time to look back at the best that 2023 has had to offer, as determined by three of the best in the business. My trusted horror chancellor, Emily Hughes joins me ­– alongside C.J. Leede, the author of this year’s gloriously transgressive Maeve Fly, and the maestro of the macabre himself, Victor Lavalle. Together we cover the year’...

Send us a text We’re going up in the world this week – longitudinally and latitudinally, with the GOAT of endurance, adventure Gothic, Michelle Paver.   Michelle joins me for a big conversation about her novels Dark Matter and Thin Air – two of the most effective ghost stories of the 21st century. One takes us to the Arctic, the other to a Himalayan peak, both places littered with the dead… who ma...

Send us a text Last time Gemma Amor came on the show we had a good ol’ chinwag about our haunted brains. This time around we get to some other ghosts, in her new novel, The Folly.   It’s a sharp slice of coastal Gothic; Cornwall’s answer to The Shining if you will. The story follows Morgan and her aging father to the weird structure of the tital, where they find hauntings of many stripes, some unc...

Send us a text We’ve had Cowboys versus Aliens but have you ever considered a threeway fight between gunslingers, vampires and weird cosmic cultists to an Elder God?    If not why not? What do you even think about when you are washing the dishes? But fear not, C.S. Humble has you covered. His weird western trilogy, That Light Sublime is packed with all of the above and more. In The Massacre at Yel...

Send us a text Sometimes two words can make a jaded horror reader sit up straight.    Ghost is one, Dinosaur is another.   Ghost. Dinosaur.   Have you ever heard a more beautiful combination, a sweeter symphony of syllables.   If “Ghost Dinosaur” doesn’t make you go squeeee and shake your fists in excitement, I don’t know how to help you.   Anyway, that’s the focus of Luke Dumas delightful new nov...

Send us a text Horror is about finding light in darkness.   That’s the mission statement of this podcast, at least. And it’s never been truer than in this week’s episode. Tyler Jones re-joins us on Talking Scared to talk about his new novel, Midas. We cover its original mix of western tropes, Gothic fantasy and cult horror, but it’s family that lies at the heart of both the book and the conversati...

Send us a text History is haunted. Ghosts are injustice persevering.   So many horror stories hinge on that idea, but for Tananarive Due it’s more personal than that. Her new novel, The Reformatory, is borne from the ghosts hidden in her own family history.    The story takes place in a hideously cruel juvenile correction facility, in a racist town, in the 1950s. As you can imagine, very few good...

Send us a text Sometimes when you’re doing something scary good company can be a blessing.    Nat Cassidy is good company. And this week he talks me through the haunted hallways and avenues of his New York horror ode, Nestlings – but he also helps me tackle the very real world horror that is turning our newspapers into nightmare-fodder and the Middle East into a tinderbox.   But have no fear (well...

Send us a text Some stories are just too big for one podcast. Some stories should be too big for one book.    Sam Rebelein’s Edenville is one such story. This 300-something page novel has more crammed into it than your average fantasy trilogy. There is backstory upon backstory, a cosmic framework, and enough different monsters to fill Guillermo del Toro’s minibus. Yet somehow Sam corrals it all in...

Send us a text Some stories are too short, some are too long, but some stories are just right. It’s the Goldilocks zone: the novella. What is the secret to crafting a longer story but not letting it run away from you? How do you sustain the terror beyond the shortest form? How do you know what to keep in and what to cut out? This is the art of the novella, and I’m joined by a pair of expert practi...

Send us a text This week is a special roundtable episode. An exciting, challenging and very very thought-provoking tour of contemporary Black horror, in the company of three writers at the bleeding edge.    Nnedi Okorafor, Maurice Broaddus and Lesley Nneka Arimah are just three of the contributors to Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. It’s curated by Jordan Peele, who knows a t...